With all the understandable uncertainty around jobs and careers triggered by Holden and Toyota’s recent shutdown announcements listeners to Geoff’s ABC Perth Breakfast show were wondering what their kids should be studying and what Future careers might be available to them.

We started by looking at the realty that many of today’s careers are going to stick around including healthcare which according to Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) will see job demand increase by 13% between now and 2017, retail trade will have a 8.9% increase in job demand and construction will have a 10.1% increase in job demands.

Other jobs, in particular routinised easily transferred to machinery jobs, will decrease and fall away.

We chatted about today’s school leavers having 6 careers and 14 jobs in their 60 years of work and 120 years of life and the notion that work, what it is and how it’s done will be very different in the future as we begin to evolve and innovate new jobs, tasks and industries that today are unthinkable.

Some of these future jobs will include Transhumanist Engineers who will undertake a HR role and employ both people and machinery/robots and teach both to work harmoniously with each other. Data Scientists (someone who manages and makes sense of data) are on the rise in geek land and will become a must have employee over the next few years as are Genetic Counsellors and Telematic Engineers.

The employment world of tomorrow is evolving. On one end of the work spectrum we are returning to a pre-industrial time where work was decentralised, transitory and time appropriate and on the other end of the work spectrum we will continue to have professions that will always require substantial labour, infrastructure and and resource investments and in between these two book ends we will see a plethora of endless physical and digital career and work style possibilities.

Have a listen now to the interview and then share your thoughts on the careers and industries of the future.